Month: January 2014

The world silent around me, partially from the early hour, partially from the snowfall of yesterday dampening the landscape. Laying here in bed, without anyone expecting anything from me at this moment. I could aimlessly surf the web and my many apps. I could just lay there and not do a thing.

Or I can write and create something.

I had not kept up with writing over the past five years or so. Much of that was due to my career in customer service and sales engineering. I used every ounce of my writing capacity for years to craft words to help my customers. With tens or hundreds of correspondence over the course of the day that have to be written in a certain style, with no mistakes acceptable. And make no mistake, I was damn good at it.

Yet depleted any desire I had to write for fun. To think deeply on my own time and record it in “pernament” format, about any subject that came to mind. When’s the last time I got up early to write? I can’t recall. I’m sure if I queried this blog for my earliest in the morning posts, this would be one of if not the earliest ever.

What’s the conclusion here? I don’t want to end with a grand promise that I will almost certainly break. I’m just going to enjoy the moment and write some more.

For the past year or so, I would go out of my way not to use my home Macbook Pro (mid-2010 13″). It was just too slow. Minutes to boot up, especially from hibernation, made it a bear to use. Apps were slow to load, switching user profiles was a joke, and using the critical apps such as iPhoto was a joke.

Part of the problem I think is I had gotten used to SSD speeds from my work laptop, which made the Macbook feel that much slower. When the hard drive on my Macbook Pro begun showing signs of dying, I took upon the opportunity to upgrade to a SSD (Samsung 840 EVO 500GB to be exact, combined with a fresh OS install (Mavericks).

I cannot believe the performance difference. It is night and day. Boots fast, apps open/close fast, even use data heavy apps like iTunes and iPhoto is no trouble. I even have hard drive encryption with FileVault 2 enabled and it doesn’t seem to have been affected much if at all.

I now think I can easily get another couple of years out of this laptop, which for a $300 upgrade is not bad at all. And now, I want to use my home computer again. I suspect there will be an uptick in genealogy research, using computer heavy projects, etc.